Mr. Mark Brennock:

I thank the Chairman. I will mention a number of points on changes that we have made and on things that we are proposing to do. This is not to try to say that we are doing a terrific job but it is in line with what the chief executive has said, which is that we are committed to fulfilling our obligations and to serving Irish-speaking communities considerably better than we have done in the past.

The last time we met, in November, a number of members expressed disappointment and concern at the fact the SwiftQueue system for booking Covid-19 vaccinations was available in English only. Since 1 February, it has been available in Irish and in English. We are currently putting in place fairly extensive infrastructure to allow our website to be bilingual. We are focusing in the first instance on providing the information on Covid-19 and the vaccine on hse.iein Irish. That work is under way and will be complete by May 2022.

We will then progress to broader translation of our public website. There are many tens of thousands of pages on our website, so we are not aiming to have the full website translated into Irish, but we are putting in place a project towards broader translation of the website.

More broadly, as the chief executive has said, the Department of the Gaeltacht has written to us. We are going to engage with it on the new legislation and attend the workshops and seminars it is going to hold about implementing the language standards to make sure we do it well over a period of time not just to remain in line with legislation, although of course we will be in line with legislation, but to serve the patients and service users who speak Irish both in Irish-speaking communities and elsewhere.